Institutions of hegemonic masculinity such as NATO are generally considered unlikely settings for developing knowledge that recognizes the socially constructed nature of gender or structural barriers to gender equality. Yet, over the past decade, NATO has shown a notable shift toward integrating more nuanced, feminist-informed understandings of gender into its Women, Peace and Security (WPS) policy and related action plans. Drawing on qualitative data from NATO’s WPS-related documents and semi-structured interviews with NATO femocrats across organization, I investigate how such feminist-informed knowledge enters organizations that are themselves deeply built upon gendered hierarchies.
International Relations theory offers the concept of epistemic communities to explain how new knowledge enters into international organizations (Haas 1992, Sebenius 1992). While NATO has no formal epistemic community on gender, this paper spotlights a growing, self-ascribed community of practice (CoP) consisting of gender experts and advocates from national delegations, femocrats within NATO as an institution, as well as civil society actors (academics, NGO members, etc.). Using the case of NATO’s latest Women, Peace and Security policy, I argue that this group of actors effectively constitutes an epistemic community – a space for the co-creation of gender expertise aimed at influencing NATO’s gender policy. The paper illustrates different elements of this community: For instance, the Nordic Center of Gender in Military Operations (NCGM) functions as an epistemic hub – a central driver in NATO’s production of gender expertise –, while the NATO Committee on Gender Perspectives (NCGP) serves as a key channel through which this expertise informs policy recommendations for NATO’s Military Committee and circulates to member states.
The findings challenge dominant assumptions about the rigidity of security institutions as static bastions of masculinity. While security organizations remain inhospitable environments for gender mainstreaming, the case of NATO demonstrates that even in highly masculine institutional contexts, transnational epistemic communities can form and advance feminist-informed understandings of gender, which can meaningfully shape the organization’s policy. The paper also contributes theoretically by broadening the concept of epistemic communities to encompass a wider notion of who counts as an expert and what constitutes expertise (Cross 2013, Lorenz-Meyer 2010).
